Moon Cakes, Foreign Food, and a Town Called Zhengzhou

I never want to eat another Moon Cake for the rest of my life.

But first, let me explain. You see, traditionally the Chinese celebrated the harvest and the autumn moon with a mid-autumn festival. During this festival, they go home to their families and eat what they call Moon Cakes. If you were to see a Moon Cake in the States, you would think, "Oh, that must be filled with something sweet--maybe fruit, or caramel, or chocolate." But oh how wrong you would be...

You see, the Chinese have different taste buds than we have in the States. They don't like sweetness as much as we do. So when they make Moon Cakes, which look very much like a very fancy Little Debbie cake, they fill them with not so sweet things. Sometimes they fill them with fruit. Sometimes... Other times they decide that making a paste that tastes like a plate of rice and meat would be wonderfully appetizing. Other times they meet halfway and mix sweetness with meat with nuts with seeds. You can imagine the concoctions we have discovered.

It is also tradition at the mid-autumn festival to give Moon Cakes to friends and family. And since we are new here and plenty of people want to welcome us to the neighborhood, we've gotten our share. We've gotten about 20 of the blasted things so far. A handful have been very tasty. Many more have been questionable. The one thing we learned from this was that you should never blindly bite into what looks like a dessert in China.

------------

On a more interesting topic, Mallory and I took a trip with two other teachers to the capital city of Henan province, Zhengzhou [pronounced jung-joe]. One teacher who was here last year told us that there were many Western food stores in Zhenzgzhou and that we could probably buy cereal there. He was right about buying cereal. It certainly was there. It also costs about $7-8 a box. That's around 40-50 yuan per box. Consider that we can buy dinner for the both of us at a local restaurant for less than 15 yuan and you'll quickly see why we bought no cereal in Zhengzhou. We did however get a good deal on some mozzarella and pizza sauce, so all the foreign teachers will be having homemade pizza soon.

Also, another item of interest: Zhengzhou is big. Like, New York City big. We waited at one of the bus stops in the city for about 20 minutes because we could not find a bus to fit on. Literally, there were people crammed into the bus right up to the front door. There were floods of bikes in places, all fighting to get past the rows and rows of cars going the other direction. Our little escapade really made us appreciate the "small town" of Kaifeng. Now this place seems like a peaceful little village to us.

From moon cakes to big cities, keep in mind: It's all about perspective.